The Reading-With-A-Hacksaw Draft

I wrote two and a half chapters on Thursday!* Well, edited two and half chapters technically. I’m never quite sure how much damage I have to do to a scene before I can say I was really writing not editing…

And to be fair, I had done a lot of the heavy lifting already. This was just… soldering things together. I can push things around and line things up when I’m sleep deprived or sick or just dozy in the head, but I don’t like to operate machinery or things that set other things on fire unless I’m firing on all cylinders. But then: welding torches!

And voila! Two and half chapters dumped in the revised column. And I also wrote one completely new scene… which, I always feel I should not be doing in what I like to think of as a final draft. But you know, that was just never going to work out for this book.

Perhaps I should stop calling it the final draft and just call it the I Am Rebuilding It draft. ‘Final draft’ makes it sound like maybe I’m just running through it one more time. Which really is true for some scenes, but most of them… the violence, the mayhem, the blood between the lines…

* Which is like yesterday if you take into account the day-called-on-account-of-funeral, the weekend and the hey-look-a-public-holiday-who-put-that-there?